Originally written in Swedish under the title Östersjöar (1974), BALTICS is a long form poem by Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. In this book-length poem, Tranströmer creates a literal and figurative landscape where his family history becomes the psychological, perhaps even the spiritual, history of the poet himself. Time, geography, a family, an island, a country, the labor of seamanship—these elements, and so many more, show a voice whose multiplicities and conjunctions intertwine to resemble something like the layers of a symphony, a symphony of narrative, of the minimal, the liminal, the image, collisions, and fragments. BALTICS, as its plural name suggests, is an experiment in the conflation of time, a theme that has come to define Tranströmer's career as a poet.
Samuel Charters’ 1975 translation from Swedish to English is considered the definitive English version BALTICS. A revised, bilingual edition of Charters’ translation was issued in 2012.
- Title: Baltics
- Author: Tomas Tranströmer
- Translator: Samuel Charters
- Publisher: Oyez
- Place: Berkeley, California
- Year: 1975
- Length: 41pp, unnumbered
- Dimensions: 25” x 9.25”
- Condition: The light brown cloth covered boards are in good condition with minimal shelf-wear. The color of the cloth is faded some along the edges and spine from light exposure. The title on the cover is gilt. The boards are slightly warped. A partial Powell’s barcode sits in the front endpapers. The binding is tight, and the pages are clean—no folds, tears, or extraneous marks.